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If the latest flurry of news around two dueling plans to fix New York’s Pennsylvania Station has left you scratching your head, you’re not alone. Various officials I have spoken with are also fuzzy on details.
The only thing everyone seems to know for certain is that nothing meaningful ever really happens to improve North America’s busiest and most miserable train hub, despite decades of demands and promises. Hope has long gone to die on the 6:50 to Secaucus.
But now may actually be different.
Why?
For starters, because a highly detailed and, at the moment, clearly superior but unofficial proposal has suddenly emerged to challenge the one that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been slowly pulling together. At the very least, the new proposal, from a private infrastructure developer called ASTM North America, may be the disruption needed to get Albany moving.
Outlined for public officials and widely reported last week, ASTM’s six-year, $6 billion plan would reconfigure the cramped, confounding station, which is owned by Amtrak, into a single concourse with high ceilings and a grid of wide corridors that lets daylight, dignity and circulatory logic replace the rat’s maze beneath Madison Square Garden. On the outside of the station, a new, porous stone facade with landscaped terraces and rows of columns would restore a measure of the architectural sensibility and civic symbolism that New York squandered in the 1960s when McKim, Mead & White’s original Penn Station was torn down.
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A rendering by a private developer called ASTM of what a new stone facade of Penn Station would look like from 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue, with the drum of Madison Square Garden also clad in light stone. Credit…via ASTM, PAU, and HOK
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Click the link below for the article:
https://www.nytimes.com
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James' World 2 
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